I'm interested in both supporting real-life networks and communities
through social tools like blogs, and helping people form new networks
and communities.

I find that most people look at all these different tools - blogs,
wikis, social bookmarking, social networking, podcasting - and they
have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees - the people around
them. Have you seen anything interesting in terms of making systems
more socially transparent, in terms of bringing out that community of
people, those familiar strangers?

3. Mesh magic: Volunteering: 02:22

Volunteering was absolutely the best thing I could've done. Here's most of the story:

I had ignored my Web 2.0 blog feeds for so long that by the time I finally heard about mesh (and I think even that was through Quinn, who learned about it from Richard, who lives in Vancouver); anyway, by the time I heard about it, all of the student-priced tickets were sold out. Considering that student rate was $25 and full conference price was $350... well...

I sent a message to the first e-mail address I could find - Stuart's -
essentially volunteering to mop the floor or do other chores in order
to get into mesh. I heard no response. So much for Plan A. S'okay, I
had plenty of backup plans.

Plan B: Convince the company I'm an intern for that it would be
totally in line with their business and it would create value for
them. They were convinced of the merit, but didn't want to set
precedent.

Plan C: Try to get sponsor passes. We eventually tracked down the
person in charge of the Mesh sponsorship, but unfortunately she was
all out of passes.

Plan D: Convince my research lab to spring for it. Mark Chignell
agreed, mock-groaning about the weight on his pocket.

Right after I registered, I got e-mail from Mark Evans asking if I
wanted to volunteer. I had a feeling that volunteering was a very good
idea. So I did, and I loved every minute of it. =)

4. Mesh magic: At the registration desk: 09:50

I'm a paid registrant at Mesh today, but I'm volunteering at the registration desk because it's fun greeting people and making them feel welcome. Late registrants trickle in. Most of them are speakers or sponsors, but occasionally we get people I can actually help. =)

Not too many people are here yet. The combination of a riotous
afterparty at The Drake and the dull gray of a rainy morning must've
convinced most people to stay in bed. Note to self: if I'm ever going
to give a keynote address (hah!), I should make sure it's not on the
second day, or at least make sure it's the second keynote of the
day... <laugh>

I really, really want to attend the keynote conversation on venture
capital and Web 2.0. I'm interested in how venture capital can help
tiny little Web 2.0 companies, and--also important--what we can do
without venture capital. This is important to me because the
Philippines doesn't have a strong venture capital base yet, so any
ideas on how to bootstrap cool Web 2.0 companies would be totally
cool.

So I'm going to go find someone to cover for me... =) Whee!

Random Japanese sentence: 雨が土砂降りに振りはじめた。 It began to rain cats and dogs.

5. Mesh magic: The Future of Marketing: 10:13

Stuart MacDonald talks with Steve Rubel of Edelman and
Micropersuasion.com. I slipped into the session just in time to hear a
few of the questions. Here's what I've heard:

Q: I have an issue with your take on character blogs. Sorry, but you're portraying character blogs as a negative thing, but you're endorsing feeding branded messaging to bloggers to put out in the world. How is that different?

It's very different. In the Walmart example, here is a resource for you, you can do whatever you want with it. A character blog is a controlled message. It puts up a big shield between you and your audience. It says to me as the consumer that people don't want to talk to me as humans. I think character blogs - I'm sorry - they shield people from their audience.

Q: b5media. I hear where you're coming from, I really do. I think Tris' point is valid. You're creating entertainment, value for the users. I don't think that you need to say that the character is a human person. The character is the character. I think that if Darth Vader blogged, everyone would read it. (Applause.)

Let's just try it, let's see how it works. Traditional PR is in the same situation: how to demonstrate in a marketing revenue way the validity and value of PR. What I think is going to be really interesting is to see lots of people try lots of things and starting to get data. Don't be afraid to fail. This feels like 1996, generally speaking, with regards to online as this shiny thing in the sky. We're so earlydays into this that I don't think anybody has the answers. Put yourself three years down the track and looking back...

I think it's heading toward a shift. I think social networks is huge. I think that dealing with sites like YouTube... There are going to be sites like YouTube that are going to come up and be huge and then fade away, like Friendster. I think there'll be an overall shift or a new budget for creating (?..).

What's the message to agencies?

Step 1. Know where your people hang out. Know where your customers are hanging out. Where on Myspace that is, what blogs they're reading.

Step 2. Develop the infrastructure to develop a conversation. Figure out how to listen to that conversation. Everyone's gotta do that.

Step 3. Engage the audience in dialogue. Walmart example. We're engaging in dialogue with the audience.

Step 4. Empower the audience. What do they want to achieve, and how can we help them do it?

Q: I think that the uestions about character blogs show something important. They're entertaining, but they don't engage.

I'll probably get myself in more trouble if I talk about character blogs. Maybe I can jump in. I think that what's happening with this sort of thing - I talk, you listen, but call it a blog? ... Make a podcast instead. I think "I talk, you listen" still happens, but the more real "I talk, you talk" is, the better.

Q: Blogging - truth in advertising?

Blogging is going to force companies to be more open and honest. The bloggers are the best fact-checking machine in the universe. It's very easy to smell something a mile away now. If it's high interest, they'll know.

Three years from now, is it going to be possible for a consumer-facing marketing organization to control the blogs?

I don't think it's ever possible.

Q: Posting various opinions on discussion forums. Gathered huge following all over the world, started charging... Public companies came to me and started asking if I could write about them. My response was that I will if I write whatever I want to write about. They don't have any control over the message. What was great was that when the mass audience started following me, they knew I was being paid and I was still being as objective as possible. Didn't skip a beat. I see blogs in the same way.

I think corporations have moved into the neighborhood, and that people are comfortable as long as it moves the community forward.

6. Mesh magic: Venture capital and Web 2.0: 11:17

has an approach to blogging that I consider almost pathological. He
said once that he wasn't going to blog because he was so busy, and
then within the next hour he posted 14 items.

Is this another bubble? There's a lot of talk about Web 2.0, there are
a lot of ideas going around, there are ideas that might not be good
business, etc.

This morning I got a press release - and this is one of the perils of
perpetual blogging, you get fifty press releases a minute - what was
kind of interesting is that these guys sent me a release because
they'd just got venture fund (overlay for Internet Explorer). This
brings us full-circle to 1995, when we funded two browsers.
Nexton(?)'s a great platform, but it's a front end. uestion about the
bubble: it feels like one. It feels like we're reenacting things. But
then, so what? I think there is, I think there's a lot of enthusiasm,
but I also feel that it takes a lot of dead bodies to fill the swamp.
We have to do this stuff. We're kidding ourselves if we think we get
aces the first time. Make the same mistakes faster. ;) Part of my
answer is yes, but so what? There's way too much enthusiasm. I see the
same plan four or five times a day, which is crazy. There ware all
these crosspollination things. There's the Flickr of video - but it's
getting worse, really, now there's the YouTube of something else.

There are some great studies out there that go all the way back to the
Dutch tulip bubble. It was a fairly rational response among
policymakers who were responding to the tulip market. Options-based
market. The outcome was nasty, but the process by which it got there
wasn't nearly as euphoric.

One of the things that might be fueling the tiny bubbles is that there
seems to be a lot of money and people wandering out with bags of money
and they have to make investments because otherwise their money isn't
accomplishing anything. "Here's some money, I don't care what your idea is or what."

Assets under management. There's as much money out there as there was
at the bubble time, but it's just much more concentrated among the top
VC firms. It's concentrated in what people deem to be the best firms.
Problem is that in the VC world, there's an idea that the best is
always the best. VC rigged - they fish a very well-stocked pond. It's
a lot easier to look smart when you're working in an area where even
bad decisions look good. The problem with everyone else in the VC
market is that they're fighting for the scraps. I was talking to a
manager of a SV fund last week. He had made a few calls among their
limited partners on a Tuesday morning. Trying to put together 280
million. By the next morning, including faxes, three billion dollars
committed. Concentration of capital, etc. Flooding into what's
euphemistically called as alternative assets - private equity. Cash is
falling into their hands. Lot of people with a lot of captial trying
to find homes for it, and Web 2.0 and other companies...

If you can finance Web 2.0 companies on your credit card and you can
use online services for all of your work, do you need giant sums of
money that these VCs are handing out? In some cases, companies have
decided not to go for VCs. Is that a problem?

If you don't need VC, don't go for it. Do something else much more
notorious. That will give you more notoriety than taking money. If you
can build a company that doesn't require capital and you keep all the
stock, then go ahead and grow it. The trouble is that there are
legitimately many businesses where that is not the case, and there are
businesses that people think can grow without VC but they actually
can't, and by the time they need it, they're in horrible horrible
problems. A lot of the consumer-centric Web 2.0 companies, you can do
them very cheaply.

I talked about getting your head up in the . The idea of this
democratization is that all these services that used to cost money are
asymptotically approaching zero. As soon as there's an interesting opportunity, there are 30 people in it. There's no barrier to entry any more. Pecked to death by ducks out there. It's great that the cost to enter has gone so low that you can do it without venture money, so every monkey with a credit card is in the market.

Q: Given that it's so easy to start a company these days, it's amazing how these companies manage to raise all this capital without having a real business plan.

Most people believe they can flip it. YouTube is interesting. IP issues are there, of course. It looks to me like a very early mockup of what a television might be. There's more there to see than you see up front, and you need to figure out how people can pay for it, but yeah.

Can you do what they're doing, or say, like rocketboom, and then figure out the business model later?

I hate to use the G word, but there: Google. This was a search company with a great technology. The VCs had no idea what the business model was. They "borrowed" their business model. They had no idea when they started that they would turn into a rapidly growing company. Precedent well set. If you do something on a large enough scale, you might stumble your way into a business model. You had better have scale and a business that can run economically.

The problems Google has now is that (you've noticed the stock price is down, right?) they're starting to look like Amazon. Rate of capital expenditure related to growth. Maybe this problem of growing companies isn't as easy as they thought.

Q: Progression. Thinking 12 months again, what the shifts are going to be, Web 2.0 for the enterprise, do you see that kind of history repeating itself?

Absolutely. I use my inbox as a temperature indicator of what's going on out there, the stuff that shows up in unsolicited . Split between consumer-centric 99%-1% business, and now 60%-40%. The pendulum's already swinging, and the three most interesting companies I've seen in the last six months are all on the business side. They've got subscriber models, they're selling to people in business, and they incorporate intelligence.

... Most people use Microsoft Excel as a really crappy database. Let's just make shareable databases easy to use and stop them from bastardizing their Microsoft Excel.

Q: Examples of companies in this space that are profitable, that are making money? Good example: Google, how they monetized search.

I'll give you another Canadian example of a community-centric company that's insanely profitable. Plentyoffish.com. It's a really funky idea. We'll build a very utilitarian website so that people can discover each other and undercut the dating market. It's a very grassroots approach to breaking into a community market that's gotten stuck on the subscription model, introducing Adsense.

The idea of building communities. There are companies that are discovering that to keep costs down, if you can find communities of similar people, you can actually sell better keywords.

Q about VC in Canada. I've been talking to a bunch of entrepreneurs in Toronto. Hard to get attention from financing. What's your opinion on that?

Everyone thinks they have a seed capital gap. In the Valley, there's a
perception that there's a lack of seed capital. I think that in
Canada, there just aren't enough individuals who will go out and fill
that gap. Economics of seed investing isn't very good. You can't get a
return. Very hard under the current structure... Some people will
selectively do seed investing, but they're not structurally supported
in doing this. Seed captial as marketing sometimes works, too.

Q: While you can build a Web 2.0 company on credit cards, it's harder
to build 5-year businesses. Is that where VCs can bring in a lot of value?

Most VCs in Canada and the US would like to find exactly those kinds
of company and do the traditional kind of investment, putting money in
over time. Recent experience is that businesses go to mezzanine
financing. Where do I jump in? Too early - broken business model. Late
- competing against big mezzanine private equity funds.

Q: Browser was a feature, not a product. When I hear you talking about (?) getting funding, and that's just an overlay on Internet Explorer... How many of these businesses are features, not products?

Plausible deniability. Nonsense like that is getting acquired. Some of the larger companies are passing off featres as products, and the line is getting really blurry.

Q: Often talked about: Skype. What's your business model? Cast a big net out there and hope you get people. Small risk, calculated one. Are there enough technology people, you normally see us business types...

eBay acquisition of Skype. Game-changer. That's huge. You can see all
the heads swinging toward VOIP. It absolutely focuses peoples.

The death of the IPO. It's a sad event, it's very traumatic, but it's
caused a lot of change. What they've had to do is run an acquisition
game for exits. As soon as they've seen a big acquisition that's on
par with what they've gotten from IPOs, etc...

We're now back at the level of online advertising that we were in 2001.

Q: Disproportionately small number of business and consumer companies
in Canada.

That's an interesting question. Putting it in VC terms... Getting that
pace of deal flow is so different from what it's like in the US. US,
exploding with flow, numbers game. While it's up, it's still much lower on a per capita

Random Japanese sentence: 猫がバスの真正面に走ってきてひかれた。 The cat ran right in front of the bus and was run over.

8. Mesh magic: Fifteen minutes of fame: 12:14

Today's fifteen minutes of fame focused on some totally awesome social
Web 2.0 orgs and people. There was Favorville, an experiment in
goodwill. There was Gary King, a high school student who totally
understands the power of passion (hey, he got mesh to sell him a
student ticket after they'd all sold out!). There was
Taking IT Global, which is terrific for engaging youth in social
issues.

They rock.

Random Japanese sentence: このワイン、すごくおいしい。 This wine is good enough to make a cat laugh.

9. Mesh magic: Tara Hunt: 14:20

I have big dreams. I have these thoughts I thought I was alone in. Then I found the blogosphere. I found people around the world with these thoughts. I couldn't put my finger on it. It's not about a list of ideals or definitions, it's about intent. Eight months ago, I was really fortunate to be drafted through my blog to join the mecca that is Silicon Valley. I want to get a good sense because what I'm realizing eight months later is that everything has changed. I left thinking there wasn't a tech community in Toronto, that what I was thinking was crazy. We led into mesh with BarCamp. Stuff around the world. Toronto has a really amazing tech community here. I want to see and gauge, first, where everyone is at.

I like to think that everyone blogs for multiple reasons. I like to think that I'm creating my own personal history. Others to cennect with others. Others to rant, others to report on what's going on in the industry, sort of thing. Photos online.

What's happening is that this sort of media is what is buzzing the consumer the revolution.

I'd love to hear about any questions, comments, suggestions or links that you might have. Your comments will not be posted on this website immediately, but will be e-mailed to me first. You can use this form to get in touch with me, or e-mail me at [email protected] .

Page: 2006.05.16

Updated: 2006-05-1810:37:0310:37:03-0400

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